Various journalists,[205][210] economists,[211][212] and the central bank of Estonia[213] have voiced concerns that bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme. In April 2013, Eric Posner, a law professor at the University of Chicago, stated that "a real Ponzi scheme takes fraud; bitcoin, by contrast, seems more like a collective delusion."[214] A July 2014 report by the World Bank concluded that bitcoin was not a deliberate Ponzi scheme.[215]:7 In June 2014, the Swiss Federal Council[216]:21 examined the concerns that bitcoin might be a pyramid scheme; it concluded that, "Since in the case of bitcoin the typical promises of profits are lacking, it cannot be assumed that bitcoin is a pyramid scheme." In July 2017, billionaire Howard Marks referred to bitcoin as a pyramid scheme.[217] EthereumPrice.org was developed by Ether0x in March 2016 to allow users to easily track the price of Ethereum both historically and in real-time. The platform has since evolved to include several fiat currencies (EUR, GBP, JPY and others) as well as price data for a number of Ethereum ERC20 tokens and other blockchain currencies. More recently, prediction data from Augur was also added to provide insight into the future price expectations of the Ether market. Price data is currently sourced from multiple exchanges with the weighted average price of these assets being calculated by CryptoCompare.com. For more details on the weighted average calculation, see our FAQ.

To be accepted by the rest of the network, a new block must contain a proof-of-work (PoW).[75] The system used is based on Adam Back's 1997 anti-spam scheme, Hashcash.[85][4] The PoW requires miners to find a number called a nonce, such that when the block content is hashed along with the nonce, the result is numerically smaller than the network's difficulty target.[7]:ch. 8 This proof is easy for any node in the network to verify, but extremely time-consuming to generate, as for a secure cryptographic hash, miners must try many different nonce values (usually the sequence of tested values is the ascending natural numbers: 0, 1, 2, 3, ...[7]:ch. 8) before meeting the difficulty target.

• لا حرج من دفع عمولات تحويل العملات: كما هو شائع بالنسبة للبعض أن دفع العُمولات عبر شبكات الإنترنت مقابل خدمات تحويل أو شراء عُملات البيتكوين يُعد شكل من أشكال الربا غير المسموح بها. لكن إستناداُ إلى ما تم ذكره بحسب الفتوى رقم 259576 أن لا هناك أى حرج على دفع مثل هذه العمولات. حيث إنك تدفع مُقابل حصولك على خدمة معينة بما فيها خدمات تحويل وشراء عُملات البيتكوين الإفتراضية. A wallet stores the information necessary to transact bitcoins. While wallets are often described as a place to hold[93] or store bitcoins, due to the nature of the system, bitcoins are inseparable from the blockchain transaction ledger. A wallet is more correctly defined as something that "stores the digital credentials for your bitcoin holdings" and allows one to access (and spend) them.[7]:ch. 1, glossary Bitcoin uses public-key cryptography, in which two cryptographic keys, one public and one private, are generated.[94] At its most basic, a wallet is a collection of these keys. Ethereum is also being used as a platform to launch other cryptocurrencies. Because of the ERC20 token standard defined by the Ethereum Foundation, other developers can issue their own versions of this token and raise funds with an initial coin offering (ICO). In this fundraising strategy, the issuers of the token set an amount they want to raise, offer it in a crowdsale, and receive Ether in exchange. Billions of dollars have been raised by ICOs on the Ethereum platform in the last two years, and one of the most valuable cryptocurrencies in the world, EOS, is an ERC20 token. In Charles Stross' 2013 science fiction novel, Neptune's Brood, the universal interstellar payment system is known as "bitcoin" and operates using cryptography.[227] Stross later blogged that the reference was intentional, saying "I wrote Neptune's Brood in 2011. Bitcoin was obscure back then, and I figured had just enough name recognition to be a useful term for an interstellar currency: it'd clue people in that it was a networked digital currency."[228] Ethereum's blockchain uses Merkle trees, for security reasons, to improve scalability, and to optimize transaction hashing.[61] As with any Merkle tree implementation, it allows for storage savings, set membership proofs (called "Merkle proofs"), and light client synchronization. The Ethereum network has at times faced congestion problems, for example, congestion occurred during late 2017 in relation to Cryptokitties.[62] This dramatic volatility attracted global attention with the mainstream media running near-daily reports on the price of Ether. The publicity generated has been a major boon for the ecosystem, attracting thousands of new developers and business ventures alike. In 2018 the amount raised through Ethereum-enabled ICOs reached almost $8bn, increasing from just $90m in 2016. While the price of Ethereum has faced extreme volatility over the years, it is this volatility which has driven interest. After every boom and bust cycle, Ethereum comes out the other side with a fundamentally stronger platform and a broader developer community backing it. These fundamental improvements would suggest a positive long-term outlook on the price of Ethereum. Wallets and similar software technically handle all bitcoins as equivalent, establishing the basic level of fungibility. Researchers have pointed out that the history of each bitcoin is registered and publicly available in the blockchain ledger, and that some users may refuse to accept bitcoins coming from controversial transactions, which would harm bitcoin's fungibility.[123] For example, in 2012, Mt. Gox froze accounts of users who deposited bitcoins that were known to have just been stolen.[124] Using Ethereum’s “Turing complete” smart contract language, Solidity, developers are able to deploy a set of instructions to the blockchain that operate indefinitely with a high degree of finality and fraud-resistance. With the first block being mined in July 2015, Ethereum has since become the largest smart contract platform of its kind, and the second largest blockchain of all time as measured by market capitalization.
Smart contract is just a phrase used to describe a computer code that can facilitate the exchange of money, content, property, shares, or anything of value. When running on the blockchain a smart contract becomes like a self-operating computer program that automatically executes when specific conditions are met. Because smart contracts run on the blockchain, they run exactly as programmed without any possibility of censorship, downtime, fraud or third-party interference. مقارنة بأجزاء أخرى من العالم بدأت الدول العربية في وقت متأخر نسبيا باستخدام بيتكوين حيث أعلن عن قبول هذه العملة لأول مرة في الأردن في بار شاي في العاصمة عمان. وتلى ذلك مطعم بيتزا وصراف آلي في دبي[15] ومن ثم شركة انظمه معلومات في فلسطين[16] كما أصبح سوق السفير من أوئل الاسواق في الكويت و الشرق الأوسط التي تقبل البتكوين في تعاملته [17]. اما بالنسبة للعملة الالكترونية في المشهد الاعلامي العربي فقد بدأت مؤخرا فقرات اخبارية تتحدث عنها ولو بشكل طفيف كما بدأت مواقع متخصصة في اخبار بيتكوين مثل موقع بيتكوين نيوز عربية [18] التابع لمجموعة اعلامية كبيرة،وعلى مستوى الشبكات الاجتماعية يمكن للمستخدمين في الشرق الأوسط وشمال افريقيا التفاعل على موقع askbitcoiner [19] الذي يعتبر أول شبكة اجتماعية للعملة الرقمية في العالم العربي حيث يمكن العثور على الاجوبة للاستفسارات حول العملة الرقمية وتقنية البلوك شاين. وعلى صعيد الشركات اللي توفر خدمات للبيتكون بالوطن العربي فمنهما يلو (بالإنجليزية: Yellow) و بت اويسس (بالإنجليزية: BitOasis) المؤسستان في دبي. بالإضافة إلى بت فلس (بالإنجليزية: BitFils) المؤسسة في الكويت. ويمكن شراء وتداول البيتكوين محليا عن طريق localbitcoins.com . Here’s why. Ethereum is based on blockchain technology where all transactions are meant to be irreversible and unchangeable. By executing a hard fork and rewriting the rules by which the blockchain executes, Ethereum set a dangerous precedent that goes against the very essence of blockchain. If the blockchain is changed every time a large enough amount of money is involved, or enough people get negatively impacted, the blockchain will lose its main value proposition – secure, anonymous, tamper proof & unchangeable.
Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the founders of the Gemini Trust Co. exchange, reported that they had cut their paper wallets into pieces and stored them in envelopes distributed to safe deposit boxes across the United States.[101] Through this system, the theft of one envelope would neither allow the thief to steal any bitcoins nor deprive the rightful owners of their access to them.[100]
• غطاء تمويلى للمنظمات الإرهابية: قامت دار الإفتاء المصرية بتصريح أن عمليات الإستثمار والتداول في البيتكوين تُعتبر عمليات مُحرمة من قبل الدين والشرع حيث إنها تعمل كغطاء لتمويل المنظمات الإرهابية وعصابات المُخدرات. كما لعدم وجود هيئات حكومية وبنوك مركزية كان لذلك آثر رهيب على استخدام إستثمارات البيتكوين في عمليات غسيل الأموال والتى بالطبع نهانا الرسول عنها، بل ويُحاسب عليها القانون أيضاً.

The proof-of-work system, alongside the chaining of blocks, makes modifications of the blockchain extremely hard, as an attacker must modify all subsequent blocks in order for the modifications of one block to be accepted.[87] As new blocks are mined all the time, the difficulty of modifying a block increases as time passes and the number of subsequent blocks (also called confirmations of the given block) increases.[75]

As with other cryptocurrencies, the validity of each ether is provided by a blockchain, which is a continuously growing list of records, called blocks, which are linked and secured using cryptography.[30][31] By design, the blockchain is inherently resistant to modification of the data. It is an open, distributed ledger that records transactions between two parties efficiently and in a verifiable and permanent way.[32] Unlike Bitcoin, Ethereum operates using accounts and balances in a manner called state transitions. This does not rely upon unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs). State denotes the current balances of all accounts and extra data. State is not stored on the blockchain, it is stored in a separate Merkle Patricia tree. A cryptocurrency wallet stores the public and private "keys" or "addresses" which can be used to receive or spend ether. These can be generated through BIP 39 style mnemonics for a BIP 32 "HD Wallet". In Ethereum, this is unnecessary as it does not operate in a UTXO scheme. With the private key, it is possible to write in the blockchain, effectively making an ether transaction.

The first wallet program, simply named Bitcoin, and sometimes referred to as the Satoshi client, was released in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto as open-source software.[11] In version 0.5 the client moved from the wxWidgets user interface toolkit to Qt, and the whole bundle was referred to as Bitcoin-Qt.[107] After the release of version 0.9, the software bundle was renamed Bitcoin Core to distinguish itself from the underlying network.[108][109]

Bitcoin is a digital currency, sometimes referred to as a cryptocurrency, best known as the world's first truly decentralized digital currency. Bitcoin is traded on a peer-to-peer basis with a distributed ledger called the Blockchain, and the Bitcoin exchange rate to the US Dollar and other major currencies is determined by supply and demand as with other global exchange rates. The traded value of Bitcoin has proven volatile through various booms and busts in demand. Ultimately, however, many see Bitcoin as a store of value against government-backed fiat currencies.